Advanced Archive Password Recovery 4.53

Archives are great because they can take data and shrink it down; by shrinking it down, you can store more on your hard drive. Passwords are also great. Select a properly strong password and you can protect others from accessing your stuff – like your online accounts, or why not, your archives.

What happens when you password-protect an archive, and then forget the password? You are left there scratching your head, trying to remember what password you selected for that archive. To get out of this jam, you need to do what I always do – turn to software and see if there is an application out there that can lend a helping hand.

The application that can lend a helping hand in this situation is the Elcomsoft-developed, the aptly named Advanced Archive Password Recovery. This application has been developed with a simple goal in mind: to allow you to recover protection password or unlock encrypted archives. The application can recover passwords automatically, or with your assistance. If recovering the password, the application can crack it with a dictionary attack or a brute force attack.

You need to know that there are two Advanced Archive Password Recovery versions out there. First there’s Advanced Archive Password Recovery Standard which provides support for ZIP, WinZip, RAR, ACE 1.x, and ARJ archives. This version can perform dictionary attacks and brute force attacks. Then there’s Advanced Archive Password Recovery Professional, which adds support for WinZip archives with enhanced AES encryption, and which guarantees WinZip recovery (for ARJ archives and 'classic' ZIP encryption only).

Before you get Advanced Archive Password Recovery, take a look at these technical details:
Download – the download weighs in at some 2.3MB, so it should complete in very little time.
Installation – at the time of writing this, Advanced Archive Password Recovery provides support for Windows 2000, Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP.
Limitations – the trial version has numerous limitations: cannot recover passwords longer than 4 characters, some dictionary attack options are disabled, Password from keys and Guaranteed WinZip Recovery attacks are not available, the decryption keys are not shown, and only the first file from an archive can be decrypted, an attack cannot be resumed.

Pros

• Recovers the password or breaks the password of password-protected archives.
• Provides support for numerous archive formats.
• Supports archives over 4 GB and self-extracting archives
• Dictionary and brute-force attacks

Cons

• Free to try

About Elcomsoft
Details on Elcomsoft and its products are available here.

Advanced Archive Password Recovery has been reviewed by George Norman on 02 Sep 2010. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated Advanced Archive Password Recovery 4 out of 5 stars, naming it Excellent